“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925
///
On the surface Mrs. Dalloway is a book about a single day in the lives of about a dozen characters in London in the 1920s. It primarily follows Clarissa Dalloway, an aging, bourgeoise Karen who missed her chance to be something else, and Septimus, a “shell-shocked” WWI veteran who is descending irrevocably into mental illness.
Mrs. Dalloway spends the day preparing for a party she will be hosting in the evening for her self-important, upper class friends. Although her day is spent ostensibly on mundane tasks like mending her dress or buying flowers, Clarissa Dalloway’s thoughts are often on the year in her youth when she made the choices which set her tame, sensible destiny in motion. She is still conflicted by her feelings for the adventurous but muddling man she didn’t marry, and the androgynous attraction she had for her friend, the firebrand Sally Seton. During her day Clarissa has chance meetings with these old friends who are now equally dutiful in their own banal realities.
Septimus’ day is spent being cared for and shuffled to psychiatric appointments by his wife Rezia. His time in the war has deeply scarred him, and he is haunted by hallucinations of his dead friend.
I have just crossed the rubicon of middle age myself, and Mrs. Dalloway really resonated with me. The book describes the wistful longings I have for my youth, of the yearnings for the road not taken. It captures the consequences of the choices we make with our relationships, and yet describes perfectly the squeamish security of sensible choices.